Financial Analytics Tools for SAP Systems — from Oracle

Oracle has announced a suite of analytics tools intended to help organizations derive greater insight from information in their SAP systems. The new product, Oracle Financial Analytics for SAP, is now part of the Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Applications product family.

"What we're announcing is the availability of the first one of those also with out-of-the-box connectivity to SAP R3 and ECC," Paul Rodwick, vice president of product management for Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "These BI apps have a source-specific understanding of all those thousands of complex SAP tables, along with a pre-built ETL built on top of Oracle Data Integrator."

Available as a part of Oracle BI Applications Release 7.9.7, Oracle Financial Analytics for SAP is intended to help financial and executive teams to improve cash flow and profitability by extending complete financial analysis to SAP systems.

Oracle Financial Analytics includes a pre-packaged ABAP code-compliant adapter and is certified with Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition to integrate SAP Financial Accounting data directly with the analytic application. The new offering also includes prebuilt integration, metadata mapping, metrics and an analytic data model. "It has a best practices database scheme - a snowflake star schema with conform dimensions," Rodwick says. "And then on top of that - implemented in Oracle BI - is metadata that defines key performance indicators, metrics and measures. We have something like 8,000 of those across the full suite of applications. Then we have set of function-specific and role-based dashboards and reports."

The analytic suite on top of SAP is a faster alternative than building out a standard data warehouse, Rodwick adds. "Companies can implement these BI applications typically very quickly. We've seen many customers that have implemented them in about a quarter or less. And, that contrasts with a classic build-your-own-data-warehouse strategy which is maybe a year or two or longer."